Lydia Deetz and the house ghost
by Captain leon
Summary: Lydia Deetz is forced to move to a town called Winter River. There, a demonic ghost will want to harm her, fortunately her cat will be willing to protect her.
1. Arrival at Winter River

_Dedicated to Winona Laura Horowitz_

 _Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz_

.

.

 _Disclaimer: this is a non-profit fanfiction that does not attempt to infringe the rights of those who have legal ownership of the franchises: Beetlejuice._

.

.

 **LYDIA DEETZ AND THE HOUSE'S GHOST**

 **Chapter 1: Arrival at Winter River**

.

I can feel the cold... I feel it expanding in my body with every beat of my heart, every beat that is slower and slower and slower...

"Can we keep him, Mommy?" I hear a voice, and then... I feel a series of movements, I can't pinpoint the elapsed time, then the warmth embraces my body and I feel my body come back to life. I open my eyes and see a beautiful nine-year-old girl holding me tenderly and feeding me a bottle.

"Charles, look at the pretty little thing Lydia brought," says the woman who seems to be the mother.

"Now I don't have time Evelyn, I have a victim, I mean client to meet me," the man barks and then comes out the door.

"What name shall we call it, Mom?" the girl asks.

"What about Percy?"

.

.

I open my eyes and realize that I was dreaming of the time when my "mistress" Lydia rescued me from freezing to death, because I was left in a crate like garbage and in a torrential rain. And yes, I call it "mistress", because without her I wouldn't have survived, and even if this bothers other cats (cats consider humans as their possession), I don't care.

Evelyn's death affected Lydia very much, taking her for years, phase after phase of rebel phase, the last one was a "death rocker", but now it's "Gothic", and I don't think it will change, since she reached the maturity necessary to say that her appearance is not the product of a whim, but it's her own way of being, which is her lifestyle (yes, Lydia is much more mature than other girls her age).

Charles, who is a workaholic, didn't worry too much about the rebellious phases of Lydia, but seeing that my mistress was interested in the Gothic, he thought his daughter needed the presence of a mother. This meant that Charles had more hours to devote to his work and not to worry about the rest. Curiously, he chose an extravagant woman named Delia as his companion, who with her "artistic skills" and snobbish personality brought Charles to the brink of a nervous breakdown.

Delia did not take very well the fact that her husband decided to move to a small town called Winter River, but in the end she agreed, provided that she was in charge of decorating the future house and that she would continue with her works of art.

As for Lydia, she had no problem moving, after all there was nothing to tie her to New York, since she had no friends... Oh, how many nights of lonely crying!, but I was always there to comfort her.

"I swear I will protect Lydia, and I won't let anything bad happen to her" I howled with all my might, seeing her worried face as she realized the arrival of the huge moving truck.

"Do you think I'll do better in Winter River than in this place, Percy?" Lydia asked me. Her concern was based on the fact that she would go to a place that was certainly more conservative than the city and therefore her appearance would be more questioned. I rubbed my head against her hand and purring away her fears.

.

.

When we arrived at Winter River, the sensations that flooded all my senses were so strong, that I was sure that even the Deetz family would feel them (the humans woefully, do not develop their senses much), the air much cleaner, the various aromas coming from fresh and pure vegetation, the sounds of different animals (especially birds), a whole range of new sensations. And then I saw the Victorian-style house, beautiful, but I felt that something supernatural was hiding in it and began to hiss loudly as I began to arch my body and the hairs on my body stood up.

I would have liked to explore the house on the spot, but I was locked in my cage. I saw the men of the move carry a long black sofa and sitting on it, my mistress, who had a camera (she wants to be a photographer after graduating from school). After a moment I hear a car stop abruptly and a fat man comes out of it, instead of heading for the entrance to the house, he decides to enter through a window!

After meowing for a while, my mistress comes to the cage and sets me free. I rush out into the house and try to locate the source of the supernatural presence. "Sniffing magic" is a power that cats can develop to detect magic in a certain place or object and even people.

"The attic," I think, and I immediately raise the steps that lead me to the fountain of strange presence. My doubts are confirmed by hearing voices of the ultratomb across the room. It's a shame I can't get through and I decide to stand guard in the stands.

After a few minutes, I see Lydia climbing upstairs, she has a stiff face and her eyes wide open, and she holds a key. She tries to open the door but I hear someone or something that keeps my mistress from getting into the place. Together we try to listen to what happens in the room without success because of the thickness of the door.

"Percy, I heard that the previous owners of the house drowned, and a moment ago I saw the silhouette of two people in the attic, surely they are the ghosts of those people!" My mistress told me very excited because she loved all things related to the supernatural.

I'm not at all surprised that my mistress has been able to see ghosts in the house, she's not just an ordinary teenager, she was born just one Halloween day and has magical powers that made her different and at the same time special to others. She can see the aura not only of people, but also of other living beings including trees, she can also communicate with ghosts and her predictions with the tarot are never wrong. This last very admirable thing since I knew that the only way in which the predictions of the tarot had certainty, was in the antiquity of the cards, which should be at least one hundred years old, while the deck of cards of the tarot of my mistress, were of her own creation and design.

The latter was taught to me by a female cat one year that I went with the Deetz family to Washington DC, to see the National Cherry Festival in that city, she taught me that the magic of a cat was concentrated in her tail, something curious because she was of the Japanese Rabon race, a breed of cats with almost no tail. However, she possessed a lot of magical knowledge and could perform magic using her front legs. I would have liked to know more about magic, but the Deetz stayed only a couple of days and I chose to return with my mistress to New York... I wonder what would become of Ayanami sensei.

My thoughts were interrupted by a strong green light coming out under the door and the keyhole. The green was fighting furiously to overcome the white face of my mistress, when suddenly everything stopped. There was no green light in the room and Lydia tried again to open the door, but it was unsuccessful.

"I can't open it Percy, not even with the help of the house's master key," my mistress told me. Apparently the ghosts had obstructed the door lock, but I had a plan.

My mistress was called by her parents to help with the move, so I took advantage of that opportunity to leave the house and make my plan. Near the house I found a white rabbit, the biggest I've ever seen in my life, this one was under the wooden fence of the house, I jumped to land on top of it and then, I jumped on the rabbit sinking my fangs right in the back of his head. The snowy giant tried to jump, but could only move his legs spasmodically because his brain had already resented the damage and only advanced one millimeter before he died.

I can't deny that I felt sorry for it because I prefer to talk friendly with the rabbits rather than eat them, but time was of the essence, my mistress would surely try to open the attic door again and I had to make sure that there was no danger in that place. I had to go in first and see if there was any danger or not!

Carrying the rabbit up to the attic door was a problem because of the army of humans who hired Delia to refurbish the house (stupid woman, I'm sure Charles will have a heart attack sooner rather than later), but every time someone saw me I would simply disappear from their sight when they blinked, thanks to the use of "Hide in Plain Sight". How I love magic!

Once in front of the door I performed the ritual and could slide under it as if it were the simplest thing in the world. I hastened my search for the room and with "Sniffing Magic" I found that any ghost who had been there had escaped, I could only find a book of ancient and careless bearing from which emanated some magic, not too much, no matter what contained the book would not expose my mistress to any danger, of course I was still somewhat suspicious. Cats can't read, we only understand basic drawings that indicate things like restaurant, men's bathroom, women's bathroom, working men, poison danger! (this last one is very important to recognize), etc.

I thought it would be best to get rid of the book, just in case, but then I listened to my mistress's footsteps and I had no choice but to leave the room, as I knew that if I performed my magic in front of Lydia, she would not be deceived and would discover me. Not that I didn't trust Lydia, but we cats like to keep our "aura of mystery", although of course this was getting harder and harder because i was supposed to be an old cat, but somehow I was still young.

I left just in time meowing "Nya" like the good kitty cat that I am and I received the caresses of my mistress.

Were you doing surveillance Percy? what a good kitty cat you are," she told me, stroking my head and I purred her very happily and looking at her with the most innocent eyes I could put.

My mistress introduced a couple of screwdrivers and with a bit of a knack opened the door. I was somewhat displeased but at the same time proud of the easy way she opened the door.

"Come on Percy," she said, "I'll protect you."

We entered the room cautiously, my somewhat timid mistress at first was astonished to see the enormous scale model of the village and all the fear vanished from her. Then she saw the book and muttered to herself: "Handbook for the Recently Deceased."

 **TO BE CONTINUE...**

.

.

Hello, this fanfic takes several sources from the Beetlejuice Universe: the film, the cartoon, the incomplete Manga of Midori Mizurashi (The witch of peaceful pines)

I also take as a source the RPG: CAT by John Wick and some cat powers from CLASES DE CHICAS GATO website.

At first I wanted to make a fanfiction of no more than 600 words, I don't know how it turned out so much. I also wanted Percy the cat to befriend the Maitlands, the latter also got out of control.

This fanfic was translated from Spanish into English using the DeepL program, and my knowledge of English. Forgive any grammatical and punctuation errors.

.

.

Lydia Deetz and the house´s ghost

Original tittle: Un gato contra un fantasma


	2. The Maitlands

Dedicated to Winona Laura Horowitz

Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz

 **Lydia Deetz and the house´s ghost**

 **Chapter 2: The Maitlands**

Several weeks passed and my mistress was immersed in reading the strange manual, I lost count of how many times Lydia had already reread it from beginning to end. However, the amount of information in the book was incredible, it was the Grail!, the Necronomicon of the occult world! and best of all, it was authentic! However, no matter how much I listened to my mistress with all the attention and concentration possible whenever she reread the manual aloud in her room, I didn't understand almost anything, even she with how intelligent she was (she liked to read), she just understood every aspect of the book at the second reading of it.

Change of coordinates, latitudes and longitudes each time the soul of people tele-transported from one place to another, or when they passed through a particular geographical area, etc., etc., etc. Understandable reading only for someone dedicated to theoretical physics as my mistress told me. And the most frustrating thing of all, whoever wrote the manual, did it in such a way that they seemed to think: "let's write a manual of what happens after death, but let's make it as complicated as possible", since the manual didn't seem to have a basic structure or "skeleton" at the time of its writing, lacking footnotes, summaries, indexes,"facts" of any kind or any other help for readers that any book is supposed to have.

At first I was a little restless about the book, but then I was thankful that my mistress was obsessed with the manual, since it was surely this one that kept her sane. The noise in reconstructing the house was insufferable, and when that work was finished, Delia devoted herself to creating her works of art, which involved the same noise and nuisance. The woman thought she would be the cultural center of the village, but the exhibitions of her artwork were the mockery of the locals. My mistress as her insufferable stepmother have a macabre taste for art, but the artistic aesthetics of my mistress is Gothic and elegant, while Delia's is "modern and contemporary" as Lydia says, and in spite of it she was the laughingstock of the "Miss Shannon Girls' School" (which was in the upper class area of town called Peaceful Pines) from day one.

Somehow (suspected by magic), my mistress had managed to make her room not be decorated by Delia or Charles and look like the dreamy little house of Barbie or the sweethearts. For my part, after a couple of days I again felt the sensation that a strange presence was hanging over the house. Fortunately, a few rooms of the house did not suffer Delia's artistic intrusion, among them the attic (again I suspect the use of magic by Lydia), it is unfortunate that my mistress had this room locked for most of the time, so I had to resort to extreme measures, suffice it to say, that the local population of rodents (no longer rabbits, only mice and rats) decreased in numbers (it was either that or to kill also birds and fish of the place).

This time the supernatural energy source came from the impressive model of the village, but every time I jumped on it, the strange presence disappeared, even using my "Sneak" magic, which allowed me to walk on people or animals without disturbing their sleep. Whatever was circling the model were not the ghosts of the previous owners, no, it was something more cunning and evil. I had to neglect my mistress several hours a day and stand guard in place, always attentive and with my tail moving nervously from side to side (unlike dogs, we cats move our tails from side to side when we are upset). I guess during those hours when I was absent, Lydia used magic from the supernatural manual to protect the privacy of her room and attic.

The only thing I could find was an old steering wheel underneath a broken piece of furniture, I couldn't read it, I only saw the strange figure of a creature, it looked like an anthropomorphic beetle.

I was exhausted from several nights of vigil, so I went to my mistress' room to take a break. The Gothic decoration of the room was not to his parents' liking, but I must admit that it was comforting to assume personal contemplation or of any other nature and then give in to sleep.

I only slept for a few minutes as I was woken up by blows and discovered that my mistress screams in anger.

"Cut it out, there are children present!" My mistress holds her camera with determination and leaves the room. What happened afterwards was so absurd that I could not react properly.

Ghosts! Ghosts making ridiculous howls and covering themselves with sheets. All my senses were disconnected except the sight. Only when my mistress approached the ghosts without showing any fear, I could react, I began to move forward with a little hissing.

"The night of those who!" cried a man's ghost as he took off the sheet covering it.

"It's a horror movie," said my mistress, then the other ghost took off the sheets and turned out to be the ghost of a woman. Would the ghosts of the previous owners be, however they didn't emanate an evil aura or else my mistress would detect it.

"At your age a ghost would have frightened me," said the ghost woman strangely.

"Can you see us without the sheets?" the ghost asked her.

"Yes, I can do it," said my master.

"And how can you do that?" the ghost interrogated her again.

"I read the "Manual of the Recent Deceased", it says: "The living ignore the rare and unusual", I myself am strange and unusual" claims my mistress with a disturbing tranquillity.

In order not to be discovered by Delia or Charles, they decide to go up to the attic, I of course accompany them. Lydia tries to break the ice by praising the work that the ghost man did with the model and the good choice of wallpaper that made the ghost woman. My mistress is very clever, she did an investigation about the previous owners of the house and found out their tastes and so on. Both ghosts were the Maitlands, the man's name was Adam, and the woman was Barbara.

It turns out that the ghosts hated the way Delia destroyed the interior decoration and replaced the rural furniture that they loved so much, and accepted with boldness that they wanted to expel the Deetz.

Charles called my mistress, and she told them that if they wanted to expel her family, they would have to think of something else than cover themselves with sheets, and she said goodbye with a smile because of the absurd concept of ghosts disguised with sheets.

"And you kitten, will you help us too?" Adam said to me in a joking tone.

"Never more," I said.

The ghosts jumped out of fear, as cats aren't supposed to talk.

"The cat speaks Adam!" Barbara shouted, holding tightly to the man's arm.

"Can you understand us?" Adam asked.

"Never more" I replied amusingly, trying to torture them in the same way as Alan Poe's The Raven (My mistress is a Poe fanatic).

The ghosts kept trying to communicate with me and I kept responding to them in the same way over and over again. I wanted to play the game until they got mad, but the ridiculousness of the situation won me over, and in the end I couldn't stand the laughter.

"My ribs are going to break, stop putting on those faces! You're killing me..."

"Hey, you can speak correctly," cried Adam between angry and perplexed.

I cleared my throat to let the laughter go.

"Of course I can speak and fluid, I am not a foolish dog" I said looking at them with the most severe look I could give them.

"Oh, we're sorry," said Barbara, "we've never seen a cat talk before... And what's the name."

"You mean "what is YOUR name," ghost woman," I replied petulantly.

"Hey, My wife has a name and so do I," said Adam.

"I don't care what you're called, for me you're ghost man and she's ghost woman, that's enough," I said rudely. "I don't give a damn about Delia and Charles Deetz, but they are MY humans, they belong only to me, they are nobody else's, and I won't let a bunch of lame phantoms try to drive the Deetz out of this house. Besides, my mistress Lydia is comfortable in this place and that's all I'm interested in."

Adam was furious, but Barbara tried to calm the situation down.

"How is Lydia your mistress and not the Deetz?" She asked me.

"The cats have no owner, it is the humans who belong to us, and Miss Lydia, well, she is a noble exception to the rule, and I would ask you and the ghost man to stop calling her so casually, you must tell her "Miss Lydia" or "Mistress Lydia", you can tell me " Noble keeper Percy"" I ordered them with a sarcastic smile.

"Oh, I see," said Barbara, frowning her eyebrows and then going forward to Adam, she grabbed me from behind the neck and lifted me up to her face.

"Now you listen to me, you arrogant bastard! You either fix that attitude or I swear to you... Ouch! Adam he scratched me!"

As I fell to the ground, I arched my body and began to hiss menacingly. The ghosts were frightened, seeing that their bodies could be wounded.

"Listen well ectoplasm snacks, now you are simple ghosts lacking all rights, or line up or you will find out what it feels like to come out for my damned rectum," I said, with the most threatening tone of voice possible.

I immediately erected all the hairs on my body, they went to the ceiling and fell down again with force to the floor, nailing themselves into it as if they were metal needles thrown from the roof of a building of more than one hundred floors.

The ghosts, seeing themselves in this deadly rain, ran frightened to a wall that opened and disappeared over there. You may believe that a cat (even one with magical powers) might not be a threat to two adult ghosts, but in reality cats are accustomed to fighting and devouring evil entities (boggins) that threaten the psychological health of our humans. I also remembered the passage my mistress read in the manual and clearly stated that if cats and ghosts shared the house, the cat had complete and absolute power to decide whether or not the ghosts stayed in the house.

"Good thing it worked," I thought to myself. "It's not good to use" Rain of Needles ", since it's useless, almost all "needles" never hit the target, it's just only good to scare."

Lydia was surprised that the ghosts weren't in the house the next day, but she couldn't do much because she had to help her stepmother for a dinner she was preparing for guests coming from New York.

 **To be continue...**

This fanfic was translated from Spanish into English using the DeepL program, and my knowledge of English. Forgive any grammatical and punctuation errors.


	3. Beetlejuice

Dedicated to Winona Laura Horowitz

Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz

.

.

 **LYDIA DEETZ AND THE HOUSE'S GHOST**

 **Chapter 3: Beetlejuice**

.

After the dinner, which went on without a hitch, I became very nervous, I knew that my mistress would try to enter the "No World", to look for the ghosts and if she found out how they were expelled from the house... I felt guilty, I recognized that I behaved like a real jerk, but those ghosts wanted to evict my mistress from her house, besides, I sensed that they were stupid enough to invoke something dangerous to do the dirty work for them, a real danger as the manual indicated. I thought of going to the "No World", but the passage of time was so different in that place that I discarded the idea. In that, an old woman appeared out of nowhere.

I jumped up and down with a great leap of fright, I may have fought with evil entities but I never saw anyone appear out of nowhere instantly.

"Are you Mr. Percy?" a woman so old as to look like she was about to fall apart, asked.

Yes, I'm Percy.

"A pleasure, my name is Juno and I am in charge of the Department of Non Permanent Accommodation and Relations Between the No World and the World, I come to talk to you about the Maitlands... I heard that they were evicted from this house, a house they should live in for at least three hundred years before relocating them to No World."

I swallowed saliva and began to apologize, fortunately Juno, although annoyed, respected the rules that gave me the power to expel the Maitlands. It turns out that the ghosts broke several rules, such as trying to scare away the living residents of the house, leaving the manual behind, and the fact that as they themselves confessed, they were tempted to invoke a dangerous entity to scare away the Deetz. The latter was what led Juno to decide that the Maitlands should be relocated to another house.

I was relieved and asked Juno to stop Lydia from meeting the Maitlands. She assured me that with the level of magic she possessed at the moment it would be impossible for her to enter No World, not without the help of some ghost and they all knew that was forbidden. There was only one problem, Lydia had to hand over the manual, there was no choice I had to leave my ordinary cat mask and let Lydia know that I had magical powers and could talk to her.

"Well, since everything is decided, I ask you to accompany me to No World at this moment."

"I can't go there, time is running oddly in that place, what would seem to me a moment, surely it would be quite a while here."

"I'm afraid there is no alternative, when you decided that the Maitlands should vacate the house, I had to deal with a lot of paperwork, paperwork that I want you to read before signing."

"But I don't know how to read."

"Don't worry about that, now come with me because I don't have much time."

A light seemed to envelop me and suddenly I found myself in No World, in fact to be more specific, in Juno's office. The office could be defined as "organized chaos", piles of paper rows piled up in the corners. Juno told me to jump on a table on the side of which there was a row of documents that I was supposed to read and sign.

"Please use this," she pointed out to me, then she put me on a kind of helmet that looked more like an old-fashioned scuba suit. The contraption was very uncomfortable, but I discovered that when I looked at a document, inside the helmet I could clearly hear a voice as if the documents were read to me. At first I thought about the absurdity of the situation, as someone might well read the document for me, but I discovered that the helmet made me fully understand all the legal terminology and didn't need to ask any questions, which saved me a lot of time.

I read as quickly as possible and signed each of the damn papers, well actually I just stamped my footprint on them.

"Well that's it, remember that now you only have the issue of the manual pending."

"Do I have to deliver it to you in No World?"

-Not necessary, just leave the manual in the attic by tonight.

"Okay..." I didn't finish talking and I was instantly transported home. I found myself somewhat displeased, but at the same time I thanked the quick dispatch because I was worried about how long it had been.

It seemed like night and at that time I heard music, it seemed to be a wedding march.

I ran into the room and discovered that part of it had been transformed into a kind of altar where there was what seemed to be a little zombie priest, and in front of him was a whitish-faced guy with an outlandish tuxedo and beside him... My mistress!, she was wearing a red bridal gown. Both Delia and Charles were imprisoned by Delia's enormous sculptures. The situation was urgent, after the fight with the Maitlands, I had not been able to sleep the eight hours necessary to regain my magic level.

"Let her go!" I cried with all my might. At that moment my mistress turned to see who had shouted but she didn't notice that I was the one who did it, so she continued scanning the entire room with her eyesight, so I decided to approach where she was, it's a shame that the ghost understood that it was I who shouted.

"Fucking cat, get out of here!" he shouted, and with a gesture of his hand he sent me flying across the room to the wall.

"Percy! Don't hurt him" I heard my mistress pleading with him, that angered me, she should never beg for anything, for nothing!

I got up and ran towards the ghost, leaping at the last minute and dodging another magical shock that would have thrown me against the wall.

"Freak, say goodbye to your eyes!" I shouted angrily as I approached to his face and scratched the whole face trying to blind him with my sharp claws. The ghost cried out in pain but grabbed me with his hands and threw me into the display cabinet, so I crashed, smashing all the glassware.

My mistress was shocked to see that I could speak, but she recovered quickly and tried to run towards me, but the ghost stopped her.

"That's what you get out of fighting with the "super ghost"" he laughed, but then I jumped on one of the furniture in the living room to look him in the eye and said, "You may be the super ghost, but you're still going to hell."

"Say his name three times, it's Beetle…" tried to say my mistress, but the ghost covered her mouth with his hand. I ran towards the ghost, but he brought the other sculptures in the room to life and placed them among us.

I dodged the attempts of the sculptures to catch me and jumped into his face, blinding him from the left eye.

"Fucking cat, give me back my eye!" he shouted, as he turned to look at me, covering the empty eye socket with both hands, while abundant blood drained from between his fingers.

I looked at him proudly, and with one bite I swallowed his eye.

"¡NO!" the monster shouted and with one hand outstretched he tried to approach me.

"Beetlejuice," I said in recalling the name of the evil entity that the Maitlands wanted to invoke, according to the documents in Juno's office.

The ghost stopped dry and began to scream like a pig or mouse.

"Beetlejuice , Beetle..."

I was interrupted when Beetlejuice, waved and hissed something incomprehensible. I was instantly transported to a kind of desert of sick and yellowish sands.

My surprise lasted very little, because immediately my whole body resented, the magical energy of the place was not ordered but ran chaotic without control. Every fiber of my body was screaming for me to leave that place, I felt every hair of my coat cracking. I cursed my stupidity, swallowing Beetlejuice's eye might have looked great, but it didn't allow me to say the ghost's name quickly. I looked around and strange planets could be seen incredibly close to that place, ochre-colored rock pillars were worn out by the force of erosion, I couldn't see much more because a roar that seemed to have come from an underground source caught my attention.

I could see the fin of a shark in the sand, which was moving at a rapid pace between the low sand dunes. All my fur was riddled with fear, thinking that from the sand would emerge a shark willing to eat me, but what emerged was a thousand times worse... A kind of sea serpent (although we were in the desert) emerged from the sands, his skin looked hard and rough, with white and black stripes that ran through his body like rings and red eyes devoid of life. The monster unfolded more horror in front of me as him opened its jaws and discovered that from them the true head was emerging, a sickly white color and sharp teeth.

The monster looked at me menacingly and emitted a colossal roar. Somehow it seemed to me that my mind reactivated primordial, archetypal memories of that creature, as if my species had to fight back against such abominations. I was paralyzed by fear, but then Lydia's smiling face appeared in my mind and all doubt and fear vanished...

.

.

"And you decides to take this woman to be your wife," the somber priest said solemnly.

"I accept," said Beetlejuice, who was initially thinking of making a comic scene, but in the face of the eye pain he preferred to go ahead.

"And you, Lydia, decide to take this..."

"NO," shouted Lydia, "Beetl..." She tried to say the name of the ghost, but he covered her mouth.

"You see, the bride is nervous, so I will speak for her: Yes I am Lydia Deetz, you ask me and I answer, yes I love this man with madness.

Lydia was outraged by the phantom's ventriloquist trick.

"And now I pronounce you husband and..."

A strong jolt shook the entire house and the ceiling of the room collapsed due to nothing less than a "sandworm". I was riding the monster, but I felt so different.

The sandworm opened the jaws and in one bite swallowed Beetlejuice, piercing the floor of the room and disappearing through the basement...

I was so tired but I tried to get up and saw my mistress and the Deetzes, looking at me with their eyes wide open, I ran towards Lydia and held her tightly.

"My mistress, my mistress... I was so scared!" I began to cry loudly as I embraced her. I didn't realize that now my limbs and body were not those of a cat, but those of a human.

I kept crying and finally Lydia hugged me with one hand on my back and the back of my neck with the other, while she stroked my head with her cheek.

"Don't worry everything will be all right, you'll see" she whispered to me as she smiled gently.

The Deetz's surprise was capital when Beetlejuice appeared before them, it turns out that Otto had all the guilt of it all (he had rudimentary paranormal powers, so Beetlejuice was able to communicate with him), who believed in the false promises of wealth that the ghost had told him and was foolish enough to pronounce his name three times. No one knows what happened to him, although Charles said that for a second he saw Otto turned into a sweetheart and then vanished in the blink of an eye. But the biggest surprise (apart from the sandworm, which mysteriously disappeared), was the fact that I had acquired a human form, well almost human, as I retained my ears and cat's tail, fortunately no other feline characteristic appeared in my person, did not have the eyes or nose of a cat, did not have moustaches, or cat's feet, not even small parts of my body covered with hair, except the head, even though humans call that hair.

.

Lydia had to go to school, and even though I wanted to accompany her (since I was apparently the same age as my mistress), the Deetz told me that it would be too complicated so they ordered me to stay at home. Every time my mistress came back from school, she would teach me how to read and do basic operations in arithmetic and other basic knowledge of various subjects. My favorite subject was always Universal History, I didn't know that humans went through so much, maybe I was underestimating them too much and decided that from that moment on I would take a more humble attitude towards my environment and my relationship with others. But what I liked the most was that now I could take care of my mistress not only of the supernatural dangers, but also of the most real ones, because in my cat form I couldn't do too much.

Just as my mistress instructed me in human knowledge, I told her everything I knew about the magical world of cats, I would have liked to tell her more but my knowledge was very limited. Ah, I forgot that Juno became fierce when the existence of the No World was revealed to the Deetz, but then she calmed down when she learned of Beetlejuice's "definite death", of course she ordered the Deetz to keep the secret under pain that something really unpleasant would happen to them if they disobeyed. As for my mistress, Juno received Lydia's offer to write a new version of the manual in a good way, apparently no one had offered themselves simply because they were shy!

"And when you will stop calling me mistress," said Lydia, after a few days, as she looked at me with a look that I had not seen before.

"I don't know if I can get used to calling you by your name," I said with my eyes lowering a little (why was I so nervous?). These last few days I'd become increasingly aware of Lydia's appearance. When I was a cat, I didn't quite understand the concept of human beauty, but now I noticed how beautiful my mistress was, with a hair as black as the wings of the darkest of crows, a skin as white as the purest snow, eyes so black that one could see the universe in them and a smile so beautiful that it rivaled the very blossoming cherry blossoms...

"No matter how much you have changed, you will always be MY Percy," she said as she held my hand and stared at me.

"And no matter what decision you make, I will always be proud of you and will be by your side forever and ever Lydia," I replied, knowing that my words were not only a reflection of the loyalty I owed her for having rescued me from the cold and death, but that there was something warmer and deeper than just friendship that I felt for her, something much more important than just friendship.

Now I knew it, that even if I was surrounded by darkness, cold or rain, while she was at my side I could always smile and at the same time protect her smile...

 **The end**


End file.
